On Chapel Sands

by Laura Cumming

  George Stow, the Postmaster-Grocer, had grown to look very like his bacons and hams. Hams were suspended on hooks from a high wooden beam. He wore an ochre-coloured holland overall and sometimes a trilby hat, rarely removing his pipe while cutting cheese from a hunk that seemed to my mother the size of a small haystack.

  He presided over every aspect of Chapel life from behind the long counter of the large shop, formerly the lifeboat house, which was in a sense his council chamber; for Stow was central to all decision-making, being chairman of the parish council and the vestry committee, Vicar’s Warden and Postmaster General of my mother’s corner of the stores. He judged the vegetable competitions, occasionally won by George; he sold the bacon and eggs cooked by Veda, which were now strictly rationed. One or two other old men would come and lean over the counter through the day to turn over important village business and some people actually came to him for advice. His store is still there today, now an omni-purpose bazaar, and Mr Stow’s name lives on, fifty years after his death, in the sign above the kiosk selling buckets and spades outside.

  Among Stow’s conversants was George himself. A photograph shows them together in a Home Guard group on the beach. I assume their acquaintance was what got my mother this much-loathed job. Perhaps Mr Stow was trying to help by providing his friend’s daughter with government work, for these jobs were protected during the Second World War. She would not have to become a land girl or Wren, leave home or join the forces. But nor was she allowed to go to university. One day she was at school, the next she was standing stupefied behind a counter with a set of brass letter-scales trying to accept the crazy notion of handling government revenue, her childhood done.

  The Till was to be the lord and master of my existence, the feared despot, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Its contents were to be a constant dread, to be counted each evening and made to tally with the in-goings and outgoings. For such an insignificant little wooden drawer to hold such power to make me capable of such suffering. For there was no going home, no release, until the wretched thing came right. And those aged rule-books cluttering up the shelves, held no answers for a deficit problem.

  Occasionally, old Mrs Stow would appear with tea and a slice of cake to cheer my teenage mother onwards with her task. She even tried to help with these sad sums once or twice. I know this because I remember her as a figure from my own childhood, in the form of the tales my mother told. She is to me the kindly Samaritan who tries to feed the prisoner a morsel through the bars. The cake must be seed cake: that is my fantasy; and Mrs Stow will be wearing a long white apron. Sometimes she is too busy to come, sometimes she forgets and the hours trudge on, uninterrupted even by the cup of tepid tea.

  As a small child, my mother had loved Stow’s Stores.

  Coming in to the warmth, to the mixed aroma of coke fumes and smoked bacon, on a bitter winter’s afternoon, was a welcome moment. Near Christmas time especially, there were rare treats like snips of candied peel – halves of orange and lemon encrusted with a thick crystalline sugar – and raisins and currants passed down to small customers in a tobacco-smelling hand, while the adults congregated around the stove, chatting. Groceries were carried home in a flat straw bag called a bass being also the name of a fish, not one that we ever ate though, cod and haddock being the only two at Canning’s fish shop.

  Now her father had passed her on to this establishment without a word, without any thought of her future or her freedom, like an indentured servant. I can easily imagine the strength of his protective instincts, but to her it was just more tyranny and pathological possessiveness.

  Veda came into her own during the Second World War, starting a canteen at the Elstons’ end of the village where soldiers could be sustained with more than just tea. She helped to billet exhausted troops stumbling up the Lincolnshire beaches from action across the Channel or in the sea itself. Dazed figures sometimes appeared out of nowhere, and came to the house for comfort. Veda gathered around her a group of knitters, making socks for the troops rescued during the evacuation of Dunkirk. The wool was oiled and durable. I know this because my mother knitted a cardigan with the ends, oatmeal-coloured with a brilliant flash of orange at the mandarin collar and a single amber button. She wore it for thirty years and I wore it long after her as a student, just as I inherited her golden mohair coat and moss-green corduroy jacket. I wore all the clothes she made for herself with such pride, loving their longevity and invention. My mother never looked like anyone else, and her originality meant that I didn’t either.

  Soldiers came to the post office to send telegrams announcing that they were safe and well. Betty might have had a walk or two with one of them. But the dark obverse was the kind of telegram received at her end, over the telephone. ‘I had never used a phone in my life till then, and have never quite got over the magic. It took precedence over everything that was happening, and the drama of receiving dictated telegrams through that old-fashioned daffodil receiver gave me a God-like feeling as to people’s lives, with messages of life and death going through my hands.’ The mercy was that she only had to write down the devastating news; its delivery to those as yet unknowing parents was the fate of a poor bicycling messenger boy.

  When I worked at the village post office one of the stolen fruits which was most reprehensible was the reading of postcards. One should never have done it of course, but confined all day every day 8.30 until 6 in a dark little box with no windows, small wonder I looked for companionship. Let into the wall was a tiny door, like a safe, which I would unlock twice a day to retrieve the mail which had been posted on the outside of that wall into a red letter box. This had all the thrill of searching for hens eggs in haystacks and barns, another huge childhood pleasure. Open the letter box, and what might be there today? Two or three envelopes, five postcards or – nothing at all, depending on the season of the year. The postcard era in those days was very lively and in the summer time that box would be quite full of wish you were here coloured cards, stout ladies sitting squashed into deck chairs being attacked by crabs and lobsters. Each passage of writing set out to be my enthralment, above all in the unmistakably superior cards from the Misses Williamson, two spinster ladies who arrived every season to occupy their mysterious large stone house, shut up and shuttered all winter, among the sands at the far end of the village. What they wrote about I recognised as lively prose of a high order – the revelation of making gold out of straw.

  The Misses Williamson inspired in her the gift of transforming the everyday that has enriched my whole life.

  The stores where she sat are only a few yards from the beach. To put your nose outside the shop door was to inhale the briny air. But for six days a week, she never went outside and even the news percolating through the shop, in conversation, correspondence and postcards, did not quite tell her what was actually happening, historically, in the war.

  Ships ran aground at Chapel, sometimes badly damaged and even sinking. Two dead bodies had to be brought ashore in a crab boat in the near-dark of a January afternoon. When it became obvious that Germany would invade Norway, the Norwegian king took exile at nearby Ingoldmells, presumably thought to be the last place an assassin would look for him. A boy from Skegness post office was sent to him with an urgent telegram, receiving the kingly sum of sixpence from the royal purse. When the next telegram arrived, he made the mistake of handing it to an aide, who offered no tip. Henceforth the boy insisted that all telegrams were so urgent and so private they could only be delivered in person to His Majesty.

  In Skegness, the promenades and car parks were used as drill grounds; the seafront hotels as RAF billets. For several years sirens wailed out at night, the all-clear not sounded, sometimes, until next day. Bombs dropped on the golf course and the cattle market, on cafes and camp grounds, and the Tower cinema during a matinee. Strafing hit the church hall and a platform of Skegness station. People eating lunch in Miss Blanchard’s cafe beneath the pier saw bombs hit the sands, then waited in horror for an exp
losion that never came.

  At Butlin’s, there was much amusement in that park of amusements when Lord Haw-Haw used his propaganda broadcast to announce that HMS Royal Arthur had been successfully sunk by the Luftwaffe. And then, quite suddenly, the enemy ceased to trouble itself with Lincolnshire and the whole direction of fire shifted to the great cities of the Midlands. Skegness beach even reopened in 1943, in the lull after the German action. And through it all, my mother never saw a man die or a bomb drop or even an actual German. She carried on knitting and sitting in the daily misery of the post office, six days a week, going home to a tea of margarined toast and mutton. Although every now and again the Elstons’ diet was improved by the anonymous gift of a ham, left on their doorstep overnight and strictly against rationing rules. It turned out that they were given by a tall bearded farmer named Joe Kirk. He was said to have had a liking for Veda. This puts something else in the scales, and pleases me very much.

  It was here in the post office that my mother’s love of Tennyson began, as she read in her dark corner between the infrequent customers.

  On either side the river lie

  Long fields of barley and of rye,

  That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

  And through the field the road runs by,

  To many tower’d Camelot.

  She taught ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to me and then again to my daughters before any of us could even read. The wolds of her childhood are there in this very poem; and Tennyson seemed to take his rolling rhythms from the local sea. He returned again and again to the stretch of beach that runs from Skegness to Chapel and Mablethorpe, where the Tennysons leased a beach house in summer. An early poem, variously titled ‘Lines’ or ‘Mablethorpe’, pictures that sea in an anti-postcard season.

  And here again I come, and only find

  The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea –

  Gray sand banks, and pale sunsets – dreary wind,

  Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

  […]

  I love the place that I have loved before,

  I love the rolling cloud, the flying rain,

  The brown sea lapsing back with sullen roar

  To travel leagues before he comes again,

  The misty desert of the houseless shore,

  The phantom circle of the moaning main.

  When we first went to visit the new Great Court of the British Museum in 2000, my mother wept at the exalted light, the high fine world of the entrance hall, and above all the quotation from Tennyson set in the floor. She was so proud that it was by her poet.

  Let thy feet millenniums hence

  Be set in midst of knowledge.

  ‘As a child every Sunday I walked along those long flat sands of Tennyson’s reluctantly, chided by the ever-blowing easterly winds. In many poems there are lines which surely must be drawn from his brooking along the miles at the sea’s edge. The melancholy is so pervasive and in me too, in recollected grey skies and dark seas. This is where my grandmother saw him striding out.’

  And it was from a piece of driftwood found on that beach that a small box was carved, and given to Betty as a child. We have it still and it fascinates me, this art out of flotsam. Inscribed on its rounded lid is a beautiful wish: ‘May your life be one glad song.’ Who made it? She cannot recall, thought it might have been someone staying in the house. A holiday guest? Or Uncle Percy? Who on earth was Uncle Percy? They were all so unconnected.

  My mother is full of remorse that she might not properly have appreciated the box as a child. Fancy someone wandering about carving pieces of wood, she says: would anyone do that now? It is a period piece, so perfectly of its era with post-Deco panels. And whoever made the box, perhaps also made the phrase, for I cannot find it anywhere in literature.

  As a child, I naturally believed that this box had in fact been carved by Tennyson himself, right there and then on Chapel Sands.

  Looking for news of Chapel in the 1940s I came across the wartime diaries of a villager named May Hill, later published by her children to commemorate their clearly brave and loving mother. Among the talk of air raids and rationing, of picking brambles and trying to shoot a wild rabbit to fill the pot, there is to my amazement a sudden appearance by my mother. She delivers a telegram in August 1943, when the messenger boy is off duty, and is later besieged by the sudden arrival of the British North Africa Force, returning from long and dangerous duty. ‘They were sending telegrams to let their people know they were home safe. A lot of them tried out their new French on Betty Elston. Expect they were a bit surprised at first when she answered their French inquiries. Mrs Stow eventually came to the rescue.’ Earlier that year, Mrs Hill writes: ‘Poor Betty has suddenly been taken out of school and is at Stow’s post office at present. She is clever so probably won’t be there long.’ Alas, she was wrong.

  Like Isaac Newton, like Captain Smith and Sir John Franklin, yearning for the open water and an end to the flatlands, Tennyson did not stay. Dreaming of freedom, they all left, out to sea – or up into the universe, like the astronaut Michael Foale, a modern hero for Lincolnshire when he stepped out into space to repair a damaged spacecraft in 1999. My mother pictured him as another child on a Lincolnshire beach, staring up into the high skies with visions of escape.

  In the summer of 1944, an art teacher at Skegness Grammar who had noticed Betty’s gifts, then lamented her unexplained departure, persuaded George to let his daughter return to the town for evening classes. Evidently flattered, he grudgingly let her go. She would draw through the evening, stay the night with the teacher and then be back at the post office the next morning. This continued for many months until my mother got her freedom.

  I wonder now who saw her reading behind the counter, selling stamps to farmers, trying to balance the hated ledger. She sat there for more than nine hours a day for almost two years, a young girl contained behind glass, framed in a dingy corner. Did the woman on the bus see her? The invisible grandmother? Were they shocked when she suddenly vanished?

  A tutor from Nottingham College of Art somehow came across Betty’s work and drove all the way to Chapel to convince the Elstons to let her apply. She was finally allowed to do so in 1946. She left her parents, by now in their sixties, escaped Chapel for Nottingham and at long last began to live. Taught by this same tutor, she flew as a student, far away to Scotland in fact, with a scholarship to study at Edinburgh College of Art. Here she became an artist, met my father and married. Her life altered because of the vision and persistence of that one woman, Thea Downing. My daughter Thea is named after her, in memory and utmost gratitude.

  One evening in the spring of 2017, my mother and I talk about our travels together. She can remember Lake Garda and the perfect lawn leading down to the water; she cannot remember going to Madrid or Vienna; she has no recollection of Ghent or – to my sorrow – France on the many occasions that we went there. But if I bring out a photograph, something returns. She can remember the night classes at Skegness and being sent for the test at Nottingham College of Art where she was required simply to paint orange and yellow wallflowers for two hours, at the end of which a Mr Foster casually gave her an entrance pass without remark. She remembers being encouraged to apply for the Edinburgh scholarship by Thea and, on receiving the news that she had won it, running all the way from Mrs Smith’s digs right across Nottingham to tell her beloved tutor. We get as far as the move to Edinburgh and where she first lived – Frederick Street – and then, she says, rather suddenly and sadly, that it all fades out. What happens next is no longer quite within grasp.

  And something similar happens with the birthday memoir. My mother wrote it again and again with slightly different variations over the next twenty years, always at my begging, in the hope that she might have more to say about the incidents of her early life, and their effect upon her. But she never got further than the post office; not even as far as the flight from Chapel.

  When she left, it was to return less and less
until she never came back at all. There are no photographs in the album of Betty during her student years – nor as a teenager – except one last shot aged twenty-three, home from a postgraduate painting scholarship in Florence. I know that George wept when she departed for Italy, for she says so in a letter to an old friend, part of a lifetime’s correspondence recently bequeathed to me at this woman’s death. Yet there is no mention of her own feelings towards him, or the home she left behind, beyond those expressed in the memoir. Over the years, his bronchitis eventually declined into prolonged bouts of pneumonia. There were unexplained medical dilemmas. The news from home got worse, and in the freezing February of 1952, George Elston died. But still Betty did not go back. This most generous and ever-loving woman, so empathetic and compassionate, was not there for George’s death and did not return for his funeral. I do not think she even knows where he is buried.

  9

  Icarus

  The first image my mother ever owned, as a new student heady with freedom and hard-won post office shillings, was Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It was only a plate detached from an art book. But in those days such reproductions, which were printed separately and glued in by hand, might be so large and perfectly made that an old-master volume was like a miniature museum for those who would never see the originals. My mother took a scalpel and carefully filleted the plate from the page – they were tactfully attached by one edge only, as if asking to be prised free – and mounted the Fall of Icarus on cardboard. Later, we had many images in our house this way, from Fra Angelico’s Annunciation to Piero della Francesca’s diptych of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, he with his shattered nose jutting like a ledge, she with her complicated Catherine wheel of ribboned hair, a dream of misty hills between them. I first saw Dutch landscapes and images by Degas and Manet through liberated plates like these, and have always loved Manet’s portrait of Zola sitting at his desk with a large book on one knee, the wall behind him dense with black-and-white reproductions of works by Velázquez, Japanese watercolours and indeed Manet’s own Olympia, the painter giving his tacit blessing to the humble prints that anyone – even great writers – might tack up.